Speeding up Adobe Acrobat Startup

I'm very fond of the concept of Adobe Acrobat - being able to share a single PDF file that contains a non-volatile representation of a document, that you can view on-screen or via a printer without worrying about formatting issues caused by different fonts, operating systems or printer drivers. But I'm getting increasingly infuriated by the implementation: amongst other things, by the slow loading times and increasing bloat in the Reader software. I frequently have to wait 10-20 seconds for the application to load when all I wanted to do was view a single page. I don't want to complete an electronic form, verify a digital signature, print to a remote location, or manipulate a digital photo, so why do I have to wait for nearly 20 plug-ins to load before I can use the document. This is simply poor application design: most of these plug-ins could be loaded as a background task for starters, and the interface doesn't even offer a way to disable them.

As I browsed around the directory structure under C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\Reader, I discovered there's a subdirectory called Optional that contains a readme with the following text: "Put unused plug-ins in the optional directory." Super, I thought and promptly moved all the plug-ins. Hey presto - Acrobat Reader immediately transformed itself back into the speedy, lightweight tool that I loved back in version 3.

Searching around the web to see whether this was a safe thing to have done, I discovered this post from Darren Norton over a year ago with the same information. So I'm behind the times, certainly, but I suspect I'm not alone in having missed this "feature". I posted a quick mail to the "Cool Stuff" distribution list internally within Microsoft and received a number of replies from delighted colleagues, so I thought I'd share it here.

Even doing the plugin fix isn't good enough. It is still waaayyy tooo slooowwww.
This is the best way to speed up Acrobat 6.0.
Uninstall it! Try to find a version of Acrobat 5.0. You don't need all the crap they added in 6.0 anyway.